Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who took office in December, has introduced a bill that would significantly liberalize Poland’s abortion laws — even though the right to life is constitutionally protected there. 

From Communist Control to Pro-Life Constitution

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, which had facilitated a permissive abortion regime within Poland, the new Polish government passed a law in 1993 prohibiting abortion. This commitment to the right to life is explicit in Poland’s 1997 Constitution, which states that the “Republic of Poland shall ensure the legal protection of the life of every human being.” 

But Poland continued to allow mothers to obtain abortions in the case of “severe and irreversible fatal defects” and in the case of a “risk to the mother’s life and in cases of rape or incest.” In 2020, the nation’s Constitutional Tribunal declared that exceptions for fatal defects are unconstitutional, though they did not touch exceptions for the mother’s life, rape, or incest. 

The conservative Law and Justice Party, then in power, supported the Constitutional Tribunal’s decision. Party leader Jarosław Kaczyński had stated four years earlier that his party would “strive to ensure that even in very difficult pregnancies, when the child is condemned to death [or] is severely deformed, will end in birth, so that the child can be christened, buried, given a name.” 

Kaczyński is right: If a child is to die in infancy, far better for that child to be welcomed into the world, baptized, named, and mourned rather than to be brutally murdered and vacuumed out of the womb only to be discarded in a receptacle for medical waste. And at the very least, the 2020 ruling simply affirmed that Poland’s Constitution does not apply disparately according to an individual’s health or disability. At the very least, the ruling clarifies that mothers do not have the right to kill their children for eugenic reasons. Predictably, Polish liberals lost their minds.

Liberals Push for Abortion Access

This past week, New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg engaged in typical pearl-clutching when she described protests in opposition to the 2020 ruling as the “largest protests since the fall of Communism, which in turn were met with a violent crackdown by authorities.”

Of course, Goldberg neglected to mention that the pro-abortion protestors particularly targeted the Catholic Church, disrupting Masses and vandalizing both Church property and statues of Pope John Paul II. Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Poznan detailed the attacks as including “profanity, violence, abusive inscriptions, and the disturbance of services and profanations.” 

The 2020 ruling galvanized Poland’s political Left, and pro-abortion voters set their sights on the 2023 election. Though the Law and Justice Party earned the most support of any party in October’s election, the opposing coalition — composed of the Civic Coalition party and two smaller centrist and leftist parties — took control of Poland’s Parliament. Donald Tusk, a member of the Civic Coalition, became prime minister in December and set about undoing the work of the Law and Justice Party, which had governed since 2015. 

The New York Times couldn’t be happier with these recent developments. Goldberg described the election as a “rare bright spot” where voters “rebelled against a punishing religious nationalism.” After the democratically elected Law and Justice Party carried out their governing mandate from the Polish people and, in doing so, apparently undermined democracy and spurred an “eight-year slide toward authoritarianism,” Tusk’s leadership means that democracy is back. (RELATED: Poland’s Liberal-Democracy Has Adopted Martial Law)

And democracy means abortion, according to liberal logic. Actually, in Goldberg’s mind, democracy depends on abortion. She writes that “public revulsion toward a far-reaching abortion ban” played a role in “saving Polish democracy.” 

Goldberg isn’t the only one who thinks this. Liberal Poles unironically compared the election to the end of Soviet rule in 1989, when the Solidarity movement — led and animated by Polish Catholics — triumphed over communism. 

“We lead the way of going from illiberalism to again liberal democracy, as we led the way in 1989,” Polish Deputy Justice Minister Zuzanna Rudzińska-Bluszcz said. “And I think those elections in 2023 could constitute the founding myth for my generation, like 1989 constituted the founding myth for the generation of my parents.”

If only all pro-abortion zealots were as forthright as Rudzińska-Bluszcz. The goal of progressive leftists is, after all, to rewrite the founding myths of democratic nations so that abortion becomes the sine qua non of self-government. Pro-life politicians, such as those belonging to the Law and Justice Party, are demonized as an unholy fusion of Donald Trump and Soviet dictators — even though the USSR presided over a permissive abortion regime that left a legacy of between 600,000 and one million abortions in Poland in 1990. Following the 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling, the number of legal abortions in Poland fell to 107. 

Tusk Introduces Bill to Liberalize Abortion

Convinced that more women should be able to kill their unborn children, Tusk and Polish liberals are seeking to legalize abortion on demand through the first trimester and with reason after the 12th week of pregnancy. The bill submitted by Tusk’s party on Jan. 24 would also require healthcare providers to offer abortions if they receive public funding to care for pregnant women. The bill would also require healthcare supervisors to identify a different doctor willing to provide abortions in the case that a woman’s primary doctor declines to abort a child as a matter of conscience.

Though Tusk’s coalition holds a majority in Polish government, the Law and Justice Party still holds the presidency. President Duda, who is pro-life, would veto the bill seeking to liberalize abortion. And although a three-fifths majority in Parliament could override Duda’s veto, “that kind of majority does not exist on abortion,” politics professor Aleks Szczerbiak told the Pillar. 

Despite pro-abortion efforts to subvert the Polish Constitution, Duda will be able to protect unborn life — for now. Though Catholicism was once central to the Polish cultural identity, Polish citizens are losing their faith at an astonishing rate. Younger generations of Poles increasingly resemble the globalized, irreligious hegemony of the European Union, and liberal political parties have seized on abortion as a motivating issue for voters. 

In a sense, the liberal Poles who see a connection between 1989 and 2023 aren’t entirely wrong. If you asked a certain Polish pope about the two years, he’d likely see them as mirror images of each other. But where modern liberals see themselves as freedom fighters, Pope John Paul II would point out that pro-abortion activists share the same disregard for human life exemplified by Soviet communism. After all, the culture of death can be carried out by varied political regimes. 

In 1989 or 2023, then, the enemy remains the same. What remains to be seen is whether democracy can sufficiently safeguard human dignity or whether it will simply become synonymous with “abortion rights.”

Mary Frances Myler is a writer from Northern Michigan now living in Washington, D.C. She graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2022. 

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